Rembrandt's Ghost (19 page)

“Not really,” said Finn. “But you still haven’t told us how you got the little gold figure.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“It’s from Mali,” answered Finn. “Fourteenth century.”

“From the reign of Mansa Musa, the king of Mali and Timbuktu, the first of his race to make Haj to Mecca. Yes, yes, all the old stories about King Solomon’s mines and your Rider Haggard, but that is not the real answer.”

“Why don’t you tell us, then?” said Hanson.

“The real answer is where the figure was found and how it came to be there.”

“So where was it found?” Finn asked.

“Such information should be worth something, don’t you think?”

“How much did Pieter Boegart pay?” Billy asked.

“You are not he. This is another transaction.”

“You sent Pieter Boegart somewhere, perhaps to his death,” said Finn. “Pieter may well have been the black sheep of his family, but he was a Boegart and I’m sure the police would be interested in the fact that you were the last person known to have seen him. I wonder how you’d like a bunch of policemen crowding around in here, making a mess of things.”

“You are far too pretty a woman to be making such threats.”

“I’m not pretty,” said Billy. “Would it make any difference if it was me making the threats?”

“Not in the slightest,” sighed Osterman. “But I think it is a very unpleasant way to treat an old man.”

“What about the figure?”

“It was in the hands of a rather unscrupulous fellow named Wei Yang. He knew I liked such things so he traded it to me.”

“Where do we find this Wei Yang?” Hanson asked.

“He had a shop on Dewan Street, but he is no longer there.”

“Where is he?”

“Perhaps the morgue? In an ornamental urn somewhere? With his ancestors at any rate. He was found floating under the barter trade jetty by the fish factory with his belly slit and his eyes gouged out. He was also missing several fingers on one hand and it was not from the fish nibbling at them.”

“Who did it?”

“Who knows?” Osterman shrugged. “This is Borneo. Kalimantan—call it what you want. The world’s last mystery. They still have tribes who collect human heads and shrink them. They sew the teeth back in and hang them from the rafters of their longhouses. You can hear the teeth rattling like wind chimes in the night. I’ve heard it myself. Wei Yang was a bullion dealer among other things, and a smuggler. He dealt with the Dyak gold prospectors from the interior, from the
hutan
, the deep jungle, and he dealt with the
penyeludup
, the smugglers, as well. It could have been any one of them, because he cheated them all at one time or another and everyone knew it.”

“And you knew where he got the gold figurine, don’t you?” Hanson asked.

“A smuggler named Lo Chang. Part Chinese, part God only knows what.”

“Where did Lo Chang get it?” Finn asked.

“According to Wei Yang he didn’t say.”

“Or wouldn’t.”

“Or wouldn’t,” agreed Osterman.

“So where do we find this Lo Chang fellow?” Hanson asked.

“He operates a boat called the
Pedang Emas
out of Kampong Sugut. Makes the run to Zamboanga. Does a bit of piracy, as well. He’ll be somewhere between the two, I’d think.”

“Where’s Kampong Sugut?” Finn asked.

“Just north of Labuk Bay on the Sulu Sea,” said Hanson. “Below the Tegepil Shoals at the mouth of the Sugut River. Chang lives there with a woman named Cai Quin Ma. She runs one of his brothels. Looks like a goat in a dress. Can’t miss her.”

They found another water taxi and returned across the broad expanse of the bay to Labuan City. Everyone was back on board; Labuan didn’t have too much to offer if you weren’t interested in illegal sex or offshore banking. Toshi was in the galley rustling up an aromatic lunch and Elisha Santoro was in the wheelhouse waiting for them with a set of charts spread out in front of him.

“I hope we’re not going north,” he said, a worried expression on his young, handsome face. He scratched his eyebrow above the patch.

“Why’s that?” Hanson asked.

“I was just at the meteorology office in town. There’s a typhoon brewing in the Sulu Sea. A big one. They’re saying it might go to plus ten. Supertyphoon.The barometer’s dropping like a rock.” He looked at Finn and Billy. “Why, where are we heading?”

“North,” said Hanson. “Into the Sulu Sea.”

P
edang Emas
was a hundred-foot-long, hundred-ton wood-and-iron whaling ship with a history that predated the
Titanic
. She’d begun life in 1907 as a small-scale Swedish factory ship built by Nyland Versted in Oslo with the designation
Hull133
. She was sold to an Icelandic company and given the name
Haraldur Kristjánsson
.

In 1921 she was transferred to a New Zealand whaling company and renamed
Rangitoto
. Nine years after that, she was returned to Scandinavian waters and sold to the Stavanger Sardine Company, maker of the Royal Brisling brand, ostensibly as a fishing vessel but actually outfitted as a yacht for the chairman of the company. A lavish owner’s cabin was built over the main hatch, and the hold was used for small cargo and an oversized fuel tank.

Her name was changed to
Kristianiafjord
, but a few years after her extensive refit, with war beginning to loom, she was leased to the Royal Norwegian Navy as a watch boat and was renamed
King Haakon VII
in honor of the aging monarch of the country.

Inevitably the German Navy took the little ship over in April of 1940 and didn’t call it anything; they simply painted over the name on the bow and painted an identification number on the funnel. Her engines were removed and she was refitted with two-thousand-horsepower diesels for use as a patrol boat with a top speed of eighteen knots and a Nazi
Kreigsmarine
pennant where the sardine company’s flag used to fly.

After the war she had a long career as a coastal steamer under the name
Hammerfest
, her far northern home port, but by the late nineties regulatory changes in the crewing of Norwegian ships made her too costly to run, especially with those big deisels. She was sold back and forth half a dozen times until she was finally bought and refurbished by a retired Canadian dentist with a cocaine habit renamed her the
Atropos
after Horatio Hornblower’s first ship in the immensely popular series of books about a young officer in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.

It was just about as much as the dentist knew about the sea. He hired the wrong crew in Singapore who accidentally discovered his stash of coke and waited until they were deep in the Palawan Passage before they slit his throat and belly and fed him to the sharks. Lo Chang had not been quite truthful to the Surfer Dude Bandit about events following the death of the foolish dentist.

In fact it was Lo Chang himself who fed the dentist to the sharks, and later did exactly the same thing to his partner and the rest of the crew after getting them smashingly drunk. This was shortly following their meeting with the mad little Japanese sailor on the raft. Lo Chang, being illiterate and not very bright, had no idea of the significance of the stamp on the ten-tola bar of gold. He only knew that it was gold and he wanted whatever there was for himself alone. Besides, he didn’t really need much of a crew to pilot the
Atropos
, or
Pedang Emas
as she was now called.

Four days out of Zamboanga, after delivering another shipment of young girls to the sex clubs there, he returned with a cargo of five hundred Negros fighting cocks crammed into split bamboo cages stolen from a top breeder in the hold. At between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a bird, his profit was going to be enormous. In Borneo and the Philippines, it was said that there were three landmarks in every village—the market, the church, and the local cockpit. They were stinking up the little hold, making horrible noises and dirtying everything they touched, but the money would make it worthwhile.

The only thing worrying Lo Chang was the weather. He never bothered with the expensive navigation and meteorology equipment installed by the unfortunate dentist. In the first place, he didn’t know how it worked and couldn’t read the results anyway, and in the second place, when he hadn’t been in jail, he’d spent most of his life at sea and intuitively knew when the weather was changing. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sea was dead flat calm, and the air was hot, all perfectly normal for this time of year, but there were signs.

Standing in the squat little wheelhouse ahead of the Lido deck awning, Lo Chang kept both doorways open but there was no cross-draft. In fact there was no wind at all—only a strange, uncomfortable oppressive feeling along with the flat, almost surly roll of the ocean. The color was wrong too; the water had a gray, almost silver light in it, muting the green and making everything look as though it would taste like licking a doorknob. Ozone, was that what they called it? He leaned forward and blew into one of the old-fashioned speaking tubes beside the wheel.

“Cam Dao!” he called out to the Vietnamese girl whose face had been ruined by a knife-wielding patron at Cai Quin Ma’s
Puki Rumah
establishment in the big house behind the fish market. The girl was no use any more for clients, but she loved to cook and almost above all other things Lo Chang liked to eat.
“Trung nguyen!”
he called. The skinny, little creature made excellent iced coffee, which he loved. If it was dark and he’d been a long time from home, he’d occasionally use her as she’d been intended and she was quite satisfactory at that as well, not a small feat when the customer for her services weighed close to four hundred pounds.

Lo Chang looked out through the port-side doorway. Over the railing he could see the coastline, a faint gray shadow several miles away. He usually steered closer to shore, navigating by well-known landmarks, but this was the area of the Torongohok Reefs and even with a draft of only seven and a half feet, going any closer to shore was a risky proposition.

Cam Dao appeared on the bridge with his special silver-chased coffee glass. She gave a little bow and handed him the coffee. He took the glass, holding it in one meaty fist with the other hand gripping the wheel. He took a long draft of the rich coffee and sweet condensed milk mixture, then sighed with pleasure.

“Bring me lunch,” he snapped. “Some
pho
and a dish of that
muc xao thap cam
you make so well.” His Vietnamese was curt and fluent. Although Lo Chang was ethnic Chinese, he was also Vietnamese by birth. A skinny orphan child in Hanoi during the war years, he had both prospered and fattened in the time since, becoming well known for his ability to procure anything from war surplus AK-47s and Russian RPGs for the northern bandits and drug runners to lady-boys and knockoff copies of guidebooks for the sex tourists.

He had also become known for his easy willingness to commit violence and had spent a number of years as an enforcer for Truong Van Cam’s Fifth Orange Gang. After the gang boss’s arrest and execution in 2004, Lo Chang had fled the country, eventually settling in Kampong Sugut and beginning his flourishing prostitution and smuggling enterprises. In the Chinese way, he was very philosophical about these changes; life offered an assortment of tragedies and opportunities. The trick was to turn one into the other and to think about the past as rarely as possible.

Jampongong Island appeared in the distance directly ahead and Lo Chang suddenly had to make a decision. He reached into the pocket of his vast white shirt, produced a tin of Neos Pacific Cigarillos, and lit one with the platinum Dunhill he’d taken from the unfortunate Canadian dentist. The steady bow wave curled up with a mustache of foam. In the distance Jampongong looked like everyone’s idea of a perfect tropical paradise. Coconut palms fringing startling white sand beaches, forest, hills, and dense jungle beyond, all rising to a sultry forested mountain peak, its summit almost always shrouded in mist. A classic island in the Sulu Sea. Very romantic on a travel brochure for idiots like the Canadian dentist.

The problem was that off Jampongong was a large fringe of reef that swept in shoals a dozen miles out to sea. Inshore, however, between the island and Kinalubatan Point on the mainland was a channel three-quarters of a mile wide and a passage through the center with at least eight fathoms, or forty-eight feet, below the keel of the
Pedang Emas
. On either side of that middle passage were rocks and shoals that stood like razor fangs just below the surface, completely hidden from view on a day like this by the sun dazzle on the water and capable of ripping the little ship’s belly out like the knife that gutted the late dentist and his even later partner. Take the channel and he’d save half a day getting back to Kambong Sugut; don’t take the channel and he risked putting himself far out to sea in uncertain weather, losing a half day in the process.

“Najis,”
he said in Malay, swearing. The diesel thudded beneath his feet and the wheel felt slippery with sweat under his thick hand. The island was getting closer with every passing minute. He glanced out to port at the thick green line of the mangroves overhanging the water on the mainland. He took another swig of the cool brew that the little knife-scarred whore had fetched, then put the silver-handled glass down on the narrow “dashboard” shelf that ran along beneath the windscreen of the wheelhouse.